Transcript
As reported recently in Nature, a team led by Oxford University scientists has discovered a way to create pixels just a few hundred nanometers across. This could pave the way for thin, flexible, hyper-resolution, low-energy displays for applications such as "smart" glasses, synthetic retinas, and foldable screens.
The team was exploring the link between the electrical and optical properties of materials that can change from an amorphous to a crystalline state. They found that by sandwiching a seven-nanometer-thick layer of a phase change material (called GST) between two layers of a transparent electrode, they could use a tiny current to "draw" images within the sandwich "stack." Altering the size of the bottom electrode layer enabled them to change the color of the image.
The resulting "nano-pixels" are just 300 by 300 nanometers in size and can be electrically switched "on and off" at will, creating the colored dots that would form the building blocks of an extremely high-resolution display technology.
The Oxford team has filed a patent on the discovery and is now discussing the technology with investors, as well as companies interested in evaluating the technology.
The layers of the GST sandwich are created using a sputtering technique, where a target is bombarded with high-energy particles so that atoms from the target are deposited onto another material as a thin film.
Because the layers that make up the devices can be deposited as thin films, they can be incorporated into very thin flexible materials, like Mylar sheets around 200 nanometers thick.
One of the advantages of this design is that, unlike most conventional LCD screens, there is no need to constantly refresh all pixels; you only have to refresh those pixels that actually change. This means that any display based on this technology would have extremely low energy consumption.
The research suggests that flexible paper-thin displays based on the technology could have the capacity to switch between a power-saving "color e-reader mode," and a backlit display capable of showing video.
Such displays could be created using cheap materials and, because they would be solid-state, promise to be reliable and easy to manufacture. The tiny "nano-pixels" make this display ideal for applications, such as smart glasses, where an image would be projected at a larger size because, even when enlarged, they would offer very high resolution.
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